by CCW | 10 April 2009 23:00
“All the people hung upon his words.” So Luke tells us in his account of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. These words are read at Evening Prayer on Palm Sunday. “Take with you words,” the prophet Hosea, says, “and return to the Lord.” These words are read at Evening Prayer on Monday in Holy Week.
Words, and our attention to them, are one of the strong features of our Anglican heritage with respect to the observances of Holy Week. The point and purpose of this week has been to immerse us in the totality of the Passion of Christ, reading from all four of the Gospel accounts of the Passion. No other Christian tradition demands quite so much. For the attention deficit culture, it is, perhaps, too much. And yet, so necessary.Along with the Passion, readings from the Old Testament and the New, as well from the Old Testament Apocrypha, such as The Book of Wisdom, offer a rich commentary upon the spectacle of Holy Week. Once again, there is much of a muchness, once again, it is de trop. And yet, so necessary and so instructive.
Holy Week is the spectacle of sin and love, the spectacle of our betrayals, on the one hand, and the redemptive love of Christ, on the other hand. Everything converges on the Cross, “that strange and uncouth thing” as the poet, George Herbert, puts it. And yet, as another poet, John Donne, puts it, himself no stranger to the hideous realities of sin and suffering, the image of the crucified is itself a “beauteous form” that “assures a piteous mind.”
Somehow it belongs to Good Friday to negotiate between the hideousness of human cruelty and the beauty of human redemption made equally visible in the figure of the crucified Christ. The words of the Crucified have a special poignancy. We hang upon the words of the one who hangs upon the Cross for us and for our salvation.
The words of the Cross are seven in number and are derived from the four Gospels. In their classical order, they begin and end with an address to the Father. “Father, forgive them”… “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” In a way, everything that is hideous about the crucifixion is embraced in the beauty of this symmetry. But such ‘beauty’ cannot hide in any way the full scope of the horror of this day which we call Good Friday. To the contrary, it only heightens the meaning of human cruelty and folly and exposes to view the unreasoning and unfathomable depths of human depravity and wickedness.
Good Friday is about something far worse than the parade of human wickedness and destruction that belongs to the contemporary world in all of its social and political disarray. Good Friday even goes beyond the fearful destructiveness of our humanity in its relation to the natural world – our fear that we have the power to destroy the world. Good Friday reveals the greater evil of our human hearts of darkness. We would destroy God himself! And if God is a term and name that we cannot stomach and vehemently reject in the willful atheisms of our day, then think of it this way. We would destroy reality as being in any sense intelligible and livable. There is at once a hideous fearfulness in this perspective and extraordinary folly. Such monumental deceptions are our betrayals of ourselves, of God and of our world.
It is quite a spectacle. At the heart of the Passion of Christ on the Cross are the haunting and disturbing words, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” It is the cry of the Crucified to God, not as my Father, but simply as my God. It captures in words the full weight of the meaning of sin in its totally alienating power. Sin alienates us from God and from the reality of God’s world. Christ’s word is a prayer offered in the extremity of his agony, an agony greater than any of us can imagine, so habituated and inured have we become to our sinful ways.
But it is a prayer and one which, ultimately, has its embrace in the equally poignant words of Christ crucified that frame the discourse of the Cross. For what can be more convicting than Christ’s first word? “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This first word is one upon which we must hang, one which embraces us in the arms of the Crucified and carries us into the Father’s love. It convicts us of our unknowing with devastating gentleness. Our ignorance is not merely intellectual; it is something spiritual, an ignorance born out of the pretense of knowing when actually we do not know. It is a destructive unknowing. But in Christ crucified we know our unknowing and its hideous destructiveness and that knowing catapults us into the greater beauty of divine forgiveness.
Forgiveness is relational. The Son prays to the Father and says, “Father, forgive them.” Forgiveness is transactional. Something happens between the offender and the offended. Does this mean that God is offended? That would, indeed, suggest an enormous potency that somehow belongs to our humanity. This presumption is, of course, ours. And it is, of course, false. Our lies offend the truth but in no wise does that make the truth any less than the truth.
In terms of the world, the Christian wisdom that goes hand in hand with Judaism and Islam is that this is God’s world, not our world. We betray our relation to God in our misuse of his creation and one another. That is another aspect of the spiritual wisdom of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, however differently expressed and understood. But our betrayals of God and his world don’t make God any less God or the world anything less than his world.
Yet forgiveness is the distinctive and definitive doctrine of the Christian religion. It is mercy, yes, but mercy plus. What does that mean? That it is not merely bestowed as something given from on high; it is not just something passive, but active. It is transacted and realized in the transgressors, you and me. That is the simple wonder. Something is meant to happen in us. That is why forgiveness is constantly proclaimed in Word and Sacrament, in the liturgy and life of the Church. Forgiveness restores and renews our relation to God and to one another. It is transacted on the Cross and through the Cross it is transacted in us.
On the Cross the disorder and disarray of our humanity, the sheer folly of human wickedness, has its entire sway. Sin shows itself to be what it is, a destructive nothingness, a willful nihilism, we might say. Out of that nothingness, the nothingness of human sin and evil, God, for it is only God who can make something out of nothing, recreates our humanity. Forgiveness is that re-creation.
In a way, the resurrection is already present in the death of the Crucified. Blood and tears fall upon the dust of our humanity from the one who hangs upon the cross. By water and the blood out-poured comes redemption. The Sacraments of the Church flow out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ. He hangs upon the Cross. We hang upon his words. Only so can we hear and receive his prayer for the forgiveness of sins. Only so can we be raised up into the hands of the Father.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, ‘09
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/04/10/sermon-for-good-friday/
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